She reached for the keepsake box, which was inlaid with small turquoise stones. A headache was building behind her eyes and, for a moment, the container seemed too personal to open, but Aloa shoved the feeling aside.
She found an owl feather, its quill wrapped with colored thread, a braided hemp bracelet, and a birthday card that stopped her cold. There was a cartoon drawing of an elephant on the front with the words “Never forget that I love you” written inside. “You are the half of my whole, the owner of my heart. Soon, all the craziness will end and we’ll be able to live free.” It was signed “Always, Ethan” and dated six weeks before he died.
Had these been Ethan’s last words to Hayley? She thought of her own father’s last words to her: “Tell your mother I’ll put out the trash when I get back.” And hers to him: “Yeah, whatever.”
She closed the box, stuffed it into her pack, and stood. Regret was a wound that bled at the slightest touch and, right now, she couldn’t stand the ache of it.
CHAPTER 9
The house Aloa’s grandmother had built sat nearly at the top of the Vallejo Street steps, which zigzagged their way through gardens of rose, cactus, and bougainvillea to Montgomery Street below.
There were scores of these stairway streets in San Francisco: thoroughfares that, when they ran into steep hillsides, had simply been turned into steps. The myth was that early planners in Washington, DC, had laid a grid over the landscape, either forgetting or not realizing that San Francisco was built on a series of hills. The truth was that although city planners had wanted curved streets that fit the contours of the land, greedy developers had insisted on straight streets in order to make it easier to subdivide and sell lots. These stairways were among Aloa’s favorite parts of the city and the reason her grandmother had built her house where she had.
“A view even God would envy,” her grandmother Maja always said.
Her grandmother, who had spent her days in a mortuary basement styling hair and applying makeup for those who would never appreciate nor complain about her work, had designed her house to snatch every bit of view it could. Out front was a small porch with just enough room for a pot of geraniums, a chair, and a tiny table where Maja used to sit with her nightly coffee. And now there was a stack of cardboard boxes on the porch and two men sitting on Aloa’s front steps.
They were young, sporting chinstrap beards and glasses, and they looked up from their phones as she approached.
“Can I help you?” Aloa asked sharply.
“We’re here for setup,” said one of the men. He was short and potbellied. The other was medium height and thin.
“Setup?” Aloa said.
The potbellied man gestured at the boxes. “High-speed internet, MacBook Pro, thirty-inch monitor, wireless printer, hi-def TV, LexisNexis, Bloomberg, a bunch of other databases.”
“And who ordered . . . ?” Aloa started.
“Mr. Collins,” said the thin guy. He consulted his phone. “For a Ms. Aloa Snow. This is the address, right?”
“Wait right there.” Aloa pointed. “Don’t do a thing.”
The men shrugged and sat back down.
Aloa strode a few yards away, scrolled through her recent-calls list, found Michael’s number, and stabbed the screen.
“I wrote that I didn’t want contact, and I certainly don’t want your pity,” she barked the minute he answered.
“I think you called me.”
Aloa could hear the hint of a smile in his voice. She ignored it. “I want you to take back all this”—Aloa waved her arm at the boxes—“this junk.”
“If the junk you’re talking about is computer equipment, I thought you could stand an upgrade.”
“I’m fine with what I’ve got, thank you.”
“I don’t think fine includes a laptop that was around when Bush was president, and for your information, people in the Yukon have better internet speeds than you.”
She started to ask Michael how he knew, then remembered he owned a company that wrote complicated software programs for crunching big data. He’d probably hacked into her information before he’d even called her.
“We agreed on expenses, didn’t we?” Michael said. Aloa could hear music playing faintly in the background. Black Sabbath, if she wasn’t mistaken.
“But not all this.” She waved her hand again at the boxes.
“I don’t want you hamstrung by something as simple as a background search. I told those guys to give you whatever you need. They interned with my company. They’re good.”
Aloa knew Michael was right. A fact that might take her a few hours to track down with her current setup could be done with a few keystrokes with the right equipment. “Just until I’m done with the project,” she said. “Then you take it all out.”
“We can talk about that later,” Michael said as a man came out of the gated apartment complex across the street. He wore a pair of Italian loafers that likely cost more than Aloa earned in a month.
Over the past years, the city had filled with these kinds of upwardly mobile hipsters, their inflated incomes and ability to spend tempting landlords and business owners to raise rents and increase prices so that one could only survive in the city by chasing after the same god everyone else did.
Aloa shifted her mind back to the conversation. “I’m not taking the television, though,” she said. She needed a victory, no matter how tiny.
“Fine, but I thought it might help if you’re looking at videos, photos. To see details,” Michael said. He could have been condescending but he was not. “Have you found anything?”
Aloa took a deep breath. “Yes. A little.”
“That’s good.”
“I’ll need the mother’s contact info.”
“I’ll email it to you right now.”
A car started up. Expensive sounding. Probably the yuppie in the Italian shoes.
“Thanks for doing this,” Michael said. “It means a lot to me.”
“I need the money,” Aloa said, and ended the call.
She let the chinstraps and their boxes into the house, showed them where to set up the gear, and wondered at her overreaction. The truth was, part of the reason she’d accepted the job was the very reason it was so hard to do. It wasn’t the money that had finally sealed her decision, although that was certainly a huge part of it. It was the hurt she’d heard in Michael’s voice during that first call, the same hurt she’d heard when he’d finally told her about his sister, the one whose murder had set off the end of his family.
Her name was Michelle and she had been Michael’s twin. A rebellious and sometimes self-destructive girl who was flunking out of school and had twice been suspended for smoking weed, her body was found two months after she had disappeared during a trip to the mall. She’d been strangled.
At first, police had called her a runaway, then zeroed in on the dysfunction of the family and of her own life: evidence of an abortion shortly before her death, a screaming fight between her and her father that was overheard by neighbors, a progress report that showed she was failing two classes. The police had arrived at Michael’s house with a search warrant three weeks after her body was found, hinted at evidence of possible abuse at the hands of Michael’s father, and the next day, Michael’s father had ended everything with three blasts of a Winchester Model 70 hunting rifle.
Michael never found out why he had been spared.
There were no arrests, no other suspects named, and only Michael seemed to think the case had not been closed. Aloa guessed the sloppy investigation into Hayley’s death, a young woman who had her own troubles, had opened old wounds for Michael. The end result had her working as a reporter again with him back in her life. Either one of those things could end with a Thelma-and-Louise-like emotional crash. Once again, she wondered if she was making a mistake.
Aloa told the chinstraps to lock up when they were done and strode down the hill toward Justus. She tapped a search into her phone as she walked. Three thumbnail images appear
ed on her screen: a handsome dark-haired man in a tuxedo outside some fancy hotel, the same man splattered with mud on a mountain bike, and a close-up of the man with a three-day beard and troubled eyes.
Michael hadn’t changed all that much since the last day she had seen him. She thought of how innocent she’d been in those years when he had lived with them, of how life had seemed full of possibilities then, and how everything had changed with the words in one note. She turned off the phone.
“Just do your job,” she told herself.
CHAPTER 10
Tick waved from a back table as Aloa came in the door. The rest of the Brain Farm was in attendance, old men whose hair ranged from bald to salt-and-pepper crew cut to ponytail.
“Get over here, Ink,” Tick called.
Aloa sighed internally. All she wanted was to sit down with a glass of wine and maybe a few bites of what was on today’s menu. Still, having someone at the table might take the edge off the inner voice that whispered about calories and the roundness of her belly every time she ate.
A list of yesterday’s food with a calorie count already sat in her notebook. Ten ounces duck pho, two ounces scotch, eight hundred calories. A slippery slope if she let it go too far.
“We hear you might be working on something,” Tick said before she could even sit.
“I’ve just started,” she said, settling herself at the table.
“Spill,” ordered the crew-cut old photographer known as P-Mac. He had a hawklike face and sharp gray eyes. There were stories of him from the Vietnam War: running through gunfire to capture the shot of a medic giving CPR to a wounded comrade, wading into a river to take a shot of a Vietnamese family fleeing a bombing raid, disappearing for a week into the Cambodian jungle and coming back with images so troubling he said he would never show them to anybody. He always sat with his back to the wall.
“It’s about a girl who died in the desert. I’m doing it for Novo.”
The Brain Farm nodded approvingly.
“Just research,” Aloa amended. “No promises I’ll even turn in anything.”
“Hair of the dog, Ink,” P-Mac said. “High time you got back in the saddle.”
Erik arrived in time to interrupt more mixing of metaphors. He set a glass of house red in front of Aloa, inspecting her outfit.
“Desperately Seeking Susan 2.0?” he said. “Does that mean you took the assignment?” He put a hand on her shoulder.
“I’m looking into it.”
“You be careful.”
Aloa nodded.
“Something to eat, hon?” Erik asked.
The inquiry always set off an arrow of guilt in Aloa. Her grandmother had asked the same question whenever Aloa came home from UC Berkeley for visits, trying to hide her skeletal frame under layers of clothes and excusing her twice-daily hill running as a plan to join the cross-country team, even though she’d had no more chance of making the squad than a three-legged dog. Her grandmother, raised with the stories of Ireland’s great famine, could not understand Aloa’s desire to starve and had placed the blame on an insufficiency of fattening food at the university. Whenever Aloa visited, her grandmother would send her off with care packages of meatloaf and brownies. Aloa’s mother, on the other hand, had noted her daughter’s gaunt frame and nodded in approval. “I see you’ve finally gotten rid of some of that baby fat, although why you can’t wear something pretty is beyond me,” she’d said. When it came to her daughter, there was always room for criticism.
“What’s on the menu tonight?” Aloa asked Erik.
“Total America Pasta,” Erik said.
“Maybe just a cup of soup,” Aloa said.
Erik raised his eyebrows.
“OK, I’ll have the pasta.”
“That’s my girl,” Erik said, and hurried off.
Aloa turned back to the Brain Farm.
“Erik told us it was a murder,” Tick said. His slender fingers worked the stem of the wineglass. It was said he could pick a lock in under four seconds.
“More likely a suicide or an accident,” Aloa said.
“That’s what the pigs say when they don’t want the truth to come out,” said Doc. He was six foot five and broad-shouldered, an ex–Black Panther who’d retired as a college history professor and now volunteered as a cook at a couple of soup kitchens in the Bay Area.
“There wasn’t much to work with, actually,” Aloa said, giving the men a rough outline of Hayley’s story as Erik set a bowl of pasta, fragrant with pancetta, tomatoes, and wilted spinach in front of her—Gully’s version of an all-American sandwich, the BLT.
“I put a rush order on it,” he said.
The Brain Farm listened as Aloa recounted Hayley’s debt, her lost sponsorship, the death of her boyfriend, and, finally, the strange visit with the mechanic, Calvin, who had urged her to go to Uranus and avoid a High Priest.
“That’s some fugazi shit there, man,” P-Mac said when she was finished.
Aloa twirled some of the pasta onto her fork, frowned, and set the utensil back down.
“Does the phrase ‘six angles of attack’ mean anything to you, P-Mac?” she asked.
“Sure, I heard of it,” the old photographer said. “It’s from the army close-combat manual.”
“I knew it. He was army,” Aloa said. “It all fits now.”
“Sometimes that brain of yours scares me, Ink,” Tick said.
Sometimes, Aloa thought, it scares me too.
“The mechanic,” Aloa explained. “I’m thinking maybe that’s why his brain is scrambled. PTSD or some kind of traumatic brain injury.”
“You should check his service record,” P-Mac said.
“I’ll do it as soon as I get home,” Aloa said. “I got some new computer stuff: high-speed internet, big screen, LexisNexis, and some other databases. Courtesy of Novo.” She didn’t mention Michael’s name.
Tick whistled. “I’d love to get my hands on some of that.”
“You know computers?” Aloa asked.
“He’s the mayor of nerd city,” said Doc.
“I could do a little driving if you want,” Tick said.
“Oh yeah,” Doc said.
“That’s OK,” Aloa started to say, but Doc was already on his feet, shouting across the crowded bar. “Hey, Erik, we need a to-go box, man.”
And that’s how Aloa came to be sitting in her house with P-Mac and Doc watching Tick at the computer. “Beautiful, man,” Tick kept muttering. “Just pure-ass beautiful.”
While Tick searched for background on the annuity, Aloa powered up her old laptop to see what she could find about Calvin Leroy Rabren. She discovered a workman’s comp claim he’d filed when a lift at the car dealership where he’d worked had malfunctioned and crashed into his head. That led to a report about his army service and his ADHD, PTSD, and OCD—a whole alphabet of disabilities—and finally took her to a military blog where the story of what had happened to Calvin’s platoon made her want to run back and tell him, “I am so sorry for what we and the government did to you.”
According to the blogger, a member of the platoon had been abducted and his body found in an open septic tank with a gunshot wound to his head. The platoon leader, a staff sergeant nicknamed Herc, had gone all avenging angel after that, ordering one of his men to toss a grenade into the home of what he claimed were two Taliban sympathizers who’d had a role in the soldier’s death. The structure turned out to house a clandestine school for girls. Seven mangled bodies were pulled from the wreckage. Herc had received a letter of reprimand and a sixty-day suspension for what he had described as “acting on bad intel.”
Two platoon members had committed suicide after their discharge.
Aloa sat back in her grandmother’s rosé chair and twisted the feather ring on her thumb. She’d bought the band in memory of her father, who liked to say that birds were the link between earth and the heavens; that they helped us see the connection between the natural world and something greater than us.
How
much of Calvin’s mutterings, she wondered, were the truth and how much were the result of a mind damaged by the country’s ill-advised war? Was it possible he was jealous over Hayley’s love for her boyfriend? Did the knife indicate a tendency toward violence or simply a need to protect?
A shout from Doc interrupted her thoughts. “You’re looking in the wrong place, Tick,” he said, tapping the computer screen where Tick worked. “It’s always the money, you know that.”
Tick waved him away. “I told you, I’m getting to it, old man.”
“Unless it’s power they want,” P-Mac called out. He was lying on Aloa’s couch smoking a joint he’d rolled on the walk over. He’d asked her if he could spark inside—some head injury from Vietnam required regular herbal self-medication—and had lit up. “Look at William Walker,” he said. “A two-bit mercenary who went south and tried to conquer Baja and Honduras just so he could hear himself called El Presidente.”
“You can call me King Kiss My Ass if you don’t let me work,” Tick said, which resulted in a noisy argument about clandestine power-grabs and whether a few investors had inside information about the 9/11 attacks that allowed them to profit from the heartbreaking disaster.
Aloa ignored their squabble, got up from her chair, and unloaded Hayley’s things from her pack: the papers, the strange device, Hayley’s notebook. She sat on the wood floor and thumbed through the composition book, finding a news article folded into a back page. A GRISLY DEATH IN AFRICA, the headline read.
The piece was written by Mark Combs, a reporter she’d met at a narrative nonfiction workshop a few years before her firing. He was a decent reporter, although his ego hovered somewhere between large and elephantine.
She began to read:
“T.J. Brasselet crouches on a ledge high above Horseshoe Canyon in Utah, his dreadlocks copper in the sun,” Combs had written. “He is barefoot, his eyes haunted, and for a moment, I am afraid he will jump.
See Her Run Page 5
